


A Breath of Wind, A Sigh

by themus



Category: The OC
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Neglect, Depression, Drug Abuse, Explicit Language, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Parent-Child Relationship, Past Character Death, Prison, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-13
Updated: 2008-03-13
Packaged: 2019-02-23 03:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13181136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themus/pseuds/themus
Summary: Kaitlin visits Ryan in jail.





	A Breath of Wind, A Sigh

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 4th OC Sentence Fic Challenge on Livejournal.

 

  
Three years after her sister dies, six months after she turns eighteen and exactly twelve hours after her mother finally snaps and throws a TV remote at her, Kaitlin goes to visit Ryan in jail. 

Standing in the middle of the fenced-in parking lot - the beige prison walls topped with razorwire and glittering with broken glass – she feels impossibly small; a sensation she hasn't had since that hateful morning a lifetime ago when she dressed all in black and watched strangers put Marissa in the ground.

Three years. Thirty-six months. One hundred and forty-four weeks. The numbers are huge and fucking meaningless, because whenever someone whispers behind her back in the school hallway, whenever she finds yet another strange man in the kitchen before breakfast, whenever her mother looks right through her, it feels like someone stuck a knife in her just yesterday.

And maybe this whole thing is the ultimate 'fuck you' to her mother, the ultimate 'I'm sorry' to Marissa, but as Kaitlin trails a gorilla-sized guard down gated hallways to the visiting room, she's not even sure why she's doing this.

It could be penitence or self-justification. It could be the inconceivable drive she has to outdo Marissa at rebellion, as if this will finally prove that her sister wasn't a bad person and lay the ghost to rest. Or maybe this is a final 'fuck you' to Marissa, for being so hopeless and naïve in all the ways that counted when she snorted pure coke and stopped her own heart.

Stupid, selfish bitch. Stupid, perfect, flawed Marissa.

There's a space where she was now, a hole in the world filled with shifting grey emptiness.

And what Kaitlin fears the most is that the hole will never be filled.

The visiting room is packed but the atmosphere is still chokingly silent. There are tearful women at every table, some accompanied by subdued children or wide-eyed infants. At the near edge of the room an inmate holds a baby on his knee, hands spanning the tiny waist, and his leg is jerking up and down incompetently while the child performs minor acrobatics, trying to shove its own toes into a drool-covered mouth.

Babies are gross.

Ryan is sat at a table in the centre of the room, hands flat on the surface, head dipped, eyes scanning the room apathetically. He is simultaneously exactly how Kaitlin remembers him and completely different. He has lost the teenage pudginess from around his face and gained even more solid shoulders. And a combination of stifled grief and hardened bitterness serves to age him even further beyond his twenty-one years. Kaitlin knows the ingredients because she sees the same thing in the mirror every morning, over the silent dinner table every evening.

Ryan shows a flash of surprise when she sits herself down on the opposite side of his table, but it vanishes before she can make anything of it.

“You look like shit, Atwood,” Kaitlin tells him, shamelessly blurting out the first words to come into her head.

His eyebrows slip up in amusement before he catches himself and leans forward slightly, squinting at her. “Who the hell are you?”

Kaitlin straightens, squares her shoulders, looks him right in the eye. “I'm Kaitlin Cooper,” she says, and then she waits for that hesitation before the recognition, that slight pause where they're thinking, 'Oh, Marissa's sister', even if they don't always say it. She waits for the burn that always accompanies it.

But it doesn't come. Ryan just nods, like he knew it all along. She wonders if he's remembering her from the last time he saw her, all dark black curls and scrawny prepubescent body. Is he recalling how exactly her tone matches her mother's sometimes? Or is he looking at her and dissecting all the ways in which she is not Marissa?

Ryan turns his head and squints round the room and it's then that Kaitlin catches sight of a scar on the side of his neck, running up under the jawline. It's a silvery-white snake only half-buried in the skin, still shiny from newness.

She feels a shiver down her spine and the outside of her arms even though it's a hundred degrees in this packed room and she can smell the collective sweat. “What happened to your neck?”

A brief shrug as Ryan's head pans back towards her. “Cellie tried to slit my throat,” he says, his tone as bland as ever, like he's ordering dinner or commenting on the weather. Like it's _nothing_. But it sure as hell doesn't look like nothing. The cut must have been deep for a scar like that. And there are arteries in the neck. Lots of them. Not that Kaitlin can remember a damn thing about that end of anatomy. Her biology grades have been earned in the science store room after school.

Turns out Mr Castle protesteth too much.

“What happened to your face?” Ryan throws back at her, eyes flickering over her temple.

Kaitlin reaches up subconsciously, brushing at the tender area in embarrassment, then drops her hand. “Did you hear about Marissa?” she asks, feeling guilty about using this to misdirect conversation. But out of all the heartaches, that is the dullest right now. The sharper and heavier pains have all grown out of it, blooming their sorrow on fertile ground.

Kaitlin presses her lips together and concentrates on Ryan's face. There's a glimmer of sadness in his eyes. It's deep and slow, barely breaking the surface, but it's there. It's the bottom of the iceberg, unknowable in its magnitude.

“Sandy came to visit,” he replies eventually, nodding slightly as he watches his fingers twine together. “He told me what happened.”

'I'm sorry' are the words unspoken. Kaitlin can see his lips begin to frame the words before he stops and lets them drift - half-formed, silent and accusing.

Those same words have cycled through Kaitlin's head every day for three years. Sorry for not being a better sister; sorry for not being a better daughter; sorry for not being there; sorry for being here now. Sorry that _she_ hadn't died, instead.

Kaitlin draws a shuddering breath and suddenly she can feel Ryan's eyes on her, although she doesn't dare to look at him – this partner in her pain. Instead she gazes back out over the room, fixing on an elderly-looking man at the far side, sitting alone. He opens his mouth to yawn and Kaitlin notices that his front teeth are all missing, the rest yellow with discolouration.

“My mom's a bitch,” she says, still not looking back at the man across from her. She doesn't want to see it in his eyes – that he has troubles far worse than hers, that she should just suck it up and stop whining.

There's a terrible silence while she waits for him to tell her to shut up, to get out. And Kaitlin doesn't even know why she cares so much that he might say that. She should be used to rejection by now, she should have grown a hard shell to deflect all the hurt, all the emotion. Sometimes it's there, shimmering darkly when her mother throws angry words at her, but it's inconstant, unreliable, disappearing without warning to leave her vulnerable and trembling and so, so afraid.

Kaitlin hears the crisp scrape of thick cotton across metal as Ryan leans forward further, his shadow slipping over her hands where they're clenched white.

“She's your mom,” he says, whispering low, like it's a secret they share.

“I hate her,” she whispers back, and is shamed to find tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. She blinks them back rapidly.

“No, you don't.”

Kaitlin looks up and he's shaking his head, eyes pained.

“But she put you here, she's responsible for all this.” Kaitlin shrugs a shoulder in indignation and sweeps her eyes across the room. “If she hadn't gone to 'persuade' your brother . . .”

The sentence stalls before she can finish it.

If Julie Cooper hadn't gone to see Trey, then he never would have told the cops that Ryan shot him, Ryan wouldn't have been tried as an adult for attempted murder, Marissa wouldn't have gone off the rails with the stupid Surfer Nazi.

Ryan shakes his head again. “I won't say it doesn't suck, but at least she did it to protect you guys, which is more than my mom ever did for me.” He swallows thickly, and Kaitlin almost wishes he had shot her down before this conversation started. If her mother was responsible for putting him in jail, then so was his own brother. Can you ever get over a betrayal like that?

“Most of the stuff she did it was to protect you and Marissa. And maybe if I'd just let her, right at the start . . . maybe if I'd let her take Marissa to San Diego, none of us would be where we are,” he finishes.

In a grave, six foot under the earth, rotting back to nothingness, leaving nothing but devastation behind.

“What happened?” Ryan asks her again, and this time his voice is softer, less demanding, although the question is no less loaded than it was before.

How can she tell him without telling him everything? It's a spiderweb of spreading cracks, beginning with that one shattering hole in their lives until everything else is splintered and jagged. There's nothing left that just _is_ any longer. Everything is connected somehow to her.

She doesn't know where to begin. Or how. Or if she even can.

Kaitlin's hands are shaking, her eyes finding the scar on Ryan's neck of their own accord, that serrated silky line.

“Why did your cellmate try to slit your throat?” Kaitlin shoots back, not ready to answer that question yet. Or maybe ever.

Ryan lets his breath out in a slow push, not even his eyes flickering over her abrupt change of subject. His hands are back flat on the table now, fingers slightly spread and her gaze is drawn to the reddened knuckles and the odd kink in the middle finger of his left hand, the bone shooting out crooked from the joint.

“I called his bluff.”

“Huh?” Kaitlin is so transfixed by Ryan's hands that it takes her a moment to remember what they're talking about. And when she does the answer still doesn't make sense. “Is that supposed to mean something, Atwood?”

“He wanted me to do him a favour. I said no. He said he'd kill me if I didn't. I told him to go ahead and do it,” Ryan answers flatly.

He says it so plainly, in that stop-and-go cadence of his, that it takes Kaitlin's brain a while to catch up to the words. But when it does she feels suddenly flattened – out of breath. As if she's been running too hard and her chest is squeezing her lungs empty.

If anyone had asked even one day ago whether she gave a crap about Ryan Atwood, the answer would have been an emphatic 'no'.

But something changed last night. No, something has been changing for a long time. And Kaitlin has finally realised that she's drowning, and there's no-one left to grab onto but him.

She wishes she could figure out what's going on in her own head. Whether she cares if he can't save her, just like he couldn't save her sister. Whether she wants him to fail. Whether what she really wants, if she's brutally honest, is to take him down with her.

And she wants to scream, and cry, and throw lawn furniture in the pool. And she wants everyone to see her for _her_ instead of the dead girl who she isn't. And she wants a connection, no matter how slight, to the girl who used to be her sister. And she wants to feel alive, just for a little while, instead of hollow and cold and shapeless.

But despite all of it, she can't imagine ever asking someone to kill her.

“Does Mr Cohen know?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “He thinks I just got shanked. I never told him any different.”

“Would you do it again?”

Ryan shrugs, shaking his head slightly. As if he honestly just doesn't know whether he'd rather live or die. As if that simple decision is too impossible to make.

And suddenly it doesn't seem so frightening to say it. Because maybe this is why she came here, after all. To tell him. Because maybe Ryan is the only one who can understand, even just a little, because he already knows.

So Kaitlin takes a deep breath. And does. “My mom threw a TV remote at me,” she blurts out, “I wasn't looking so I didn't duck.”

Ryan nods, blue eyes searching the bruise on Kaitlin's temple. “Why'd she do it?”

“Does she need a reason?” Kaitlin spits.

“Yes,” he answers, firm and immediate, with a wide-eyed look that's so intense it takes her breath for a moment.

Then she blinks and sighs and tries desperately not to give into the urge to look away from him. “Because I said I was glad that Marissa died coz at least it got her away from her, and I told her that sometimes I wish I was dead too.” She spits it out - one long, horrible sentence – but Ryan's face doesn't change. He doesn't give her pity or disgust or any of those useless emotions. He just nods. “I could have her locked up if I want,” Kaitlin adds in a rush, because whatever she is, whatever this is about, she's not a scared little girl any more. She's not a little girl.

“But you don't want,” Ryan interprets.

Kaitlin chews on her lip. “I guess I got what I wanted already,” she says with a bitter smile. “I wanted her to finally _see_ me. Well, she must have, coz she hit me dead on.”

A guard walks past, the sudden rustle of material startling Kaitlin into remembering that she and Ryan aren't alone in the room. He paces slowly down the aisle, hand resting casually on the handle of his batonas he glances between the rows of tables, watching each inmate for a calculated second. After a minute he catches her looking at him and gives her a curt nod, his eyes a deep, serious green beneath the peak of his baseball cap.

“Did you mean it?” Ryan's voice is quiet again and when she looks back at him she finds his head tilted intently to one side, chapped lips slightly open to reveal slightly yellowing teeth.

What the hell kind of fake toothpaste do they hand out here? She kind of expected everything to be chemically clean, like the visiting room is, like the bare grey-walled cells in those awful daytime soaps that Summer insists on watching. Sterile and dehumanised.

But then Ryan's teeth were never brilliant white, Kaitlin remembers – they were that shade of slightly-less-than-perfect white. They stood out, back then, as yet another danger sign; just one more thing that told her that he didn't belong in Newport, didn't belong anywhere near her sister. And she had been mad at him, even at age eleven, because Luke had been the perfect fairytale prince, and Ryan had driven him away.

Ryan is drumming at the table quietly with his fingers – a movement Kaitlin is sure he doesn't even notice – and she looks at her own hands, twisted together now in her lap, and the yellow stain on her first and second fingers where the cigarette always sits – just below the first joint.

Maybe it has less to do with toothpaste and more to do with nervous habits.

“Did you mean it, Kaitlin?”

She stares at her fingers, at the sleek, smooth skin and the way her veins stand out a deep blue along the back of her hand, at the inside of her wrist where there's a tiny white mark between the tendons – barely even a scratch.

And how can she say it? How can she tell him that she sat all night under the pier on the spot where Marissa was found and couldn't find an answer to that? She can't tell him what it was like to be there, in the utter darkness, with the blade of a stolen kitchen knife pressed against her wrist, wondering how hard she would have to push to get it into the vein – and how much it would hurt.

She can't tell him that the only thing that stopped her was that she didn't want to be a coward like her sister, who was always and forever running away from her own life. Until she finally, permanently made it.

And that she hopes Marissa's fucking happy wherever she is, because everyone else is miserable.

In the end she shrugs and shakes her head, a deliberate copy of his answer earlier. And Ryan smirks sadly.

“I guess I deserved that.”

And Kaitlin smirks back. “Yeah, you did.”

“Atwood, time's up.”

The green-eyed guard is back, standing far enough away to show an attempt at giving privacy, but from the way he's jiggling his keys it's clear he won't be waiting long.

Ryan nods once towards him and stands slowly, hands palm down on the table. “Go home,” he tells Kaitlin, eyes boring so hard into hers that she can't look away. “Go home and tell your mom 'thank you'.”

“For what? Why?” she demands. There's nothing in that house that she wants or needs any more. Least of all a mother who barely notices her existence unless she's pissed off at her, who fucked up Marissa and is now fucking Kaitlin up too.

What she needs is distance. Distance from everything and everyone and everywhere that reminds her of the sister she lost and her worthlessness because of it.

Because Newport isn't glamorous now. It lost it's sparkle that night at the hospital with Marissa's face that was white except for the smudged red stain on her upper lip.

And why the hell should she be thankful for any of this shit?

“Because she loves you,” Ryan states simply, and Kaitlin can hear the tremor in his voice just below the words, an echoing need of his own that was never fulfilled and she swallows hard, feeling her stomach twist. “She might not be showing it now, but she will,” he goes on, “you guys are Coopers; you can tough this out.”

The guard catches Ryan's arm and gently eases him backwards. “Come on, Atwood, back to the block.”

“I'll come see you again next week,” Kaitlin finds herself saying as the guard squeezes Ryan's arm and begins to pull him away.

For a moment he doesn't respond, but then he twists his head and he smiles – a tiny, shy smile below hopeful blue eyes – and it makes her stomach flip again. “I'd like that.”

Kaitlin's still not sure why she came here – why she has this sudden compulsion to come back to this putrid room to see a boy she has spent maybe ten minutes with before now.

Nothing is any better than it was when she walked in – cold and lonely and tired of her whole screwed-up life. Nothing has been made right.

But some of it is a little less wrong. Like a breath of wind in the middle of the ocean, a sigh of refreshing air after a hot, breezeless calm.

And maybe, just maybe, that's enough for right now.


End file.
